You might expect the resulting album to be disjointed and schizo, but it's actually a cohesive collection of potential hit singles held together by an incomparable performer.

It's powerful, clever, and you can dance to it.

There's an intermittent psychedelia here that lifts even the most deadpan tracks into sunny pop territory, as sweeping, swooning So-Cal melodies erupt from its cavernous grooves.

You will love some or all of these ten tracks, but for reasons you don't quite understand, you may never love the album as a whole.

While the band has adeptly navigated the waters of change, a few moments on Night on Fire are simply too slick for their own good.

City is a noticeably fleshier beast than its predecessor; the album is lush and sophisticated with hooks aplenty.

Where Belle and Sebastian alienate their listeners with emotional detachment and indie superiority, Memphis's songs leave the posing and the cuteness at the door; they are accessible and honest.

American Idiot isn't so much meticulously crafted as it is unflinchingly audacious.

Overall, the album is more centered and collaborative and celebratory than anything Banhart has done before.

As recently as last year it looked like The Datsuns might be next in line to make arena-sized, super-popular rock the way Zeppelin, AC/DC and G'n'R did. They still might, but it's going to take better songs than these.

This is powerful stuff, unrelenting and dark.

As perfect a brew as this is, it's Gelb's voice and lyrics that push the music into otherworldly territories.

The disc's effectiveness comes from the subtlety of the theme as much as its pervasiveness.

Dizzee's voice still sounds like a helium-inflected hiccup, and the beats still sound like they were recorded directly from a Nintendo, if not an Atari.

It's definitely a departure from their earlier albums -- or, more precisely, an evolution -- but in no way did they drop the ball. Instead, they may now be playing a different game.

Listening to Funeral takes a bit of patience. With most of the songs, the payoff doesn't come right away; in some cases, it sneaks up on you after several spins.

If you'd never heard Gotham!, you might very well find much to like about Stealing of a Nation.

Perhaps their sloshing disintegration, whiplashing folk-crunch, honeyed melancholy and deliquescent time-lapse... never quite settle into a stable Gestalt, but the music hints at the presence of more looming somewhere behind it.

Sounds like it's coming from bluesmasters who've lived twice as long and seen three times as much.

The unpredictable song structures are fresh and innovative, too, twisting off in unexpected directions mere seconds before you can remember what they remind you of.

A solid set of shadowy songs with driving melodies.

The question is not whether Medúlla is brilliant; insofar as this can be objectively asserted, it most certainly is. The question is really, Do you like Björk? Do you like her a lot? Obviously, a Björk a capella album is going to be lost on you if you never really liked her vocal style in the first place.

Imagine a troupe of gloomy cow-punks careening down a thundering Hawaiian pipeline and you've got a bead on their wildly divergent sound.

As gentle, elegant end-of-the-summer albums go, Frozen Orange scores top marks. As a David Kilgour record, it's more subjective; some listeners will love the polish, while others will consider it surplus to requirements.

The giddy shift towards pop and even traditional dance music structure that Mouse on Mars take here is so irresistibly fun and persuasive that the very thought of loyalists furrowing their brows and crossing their arms is comical.

Radian boasts a sound far deeper and richer than most of their push-button contemporaries.

Half Smiles of the Decomposed isn't quite the guns-blazing finale I always imagined the last GBV album would be, but it never becomes a limp-wristed approximation of the band in any of its previous guises.

Whereas Walking With Thee was a wonderful relief in the indie/retro-rock world, pushing the band's internal parameters and the idea of what pop music should sound like, Winchester Cathedral feels more like a roadblock, or at least a pit stop, rather than a step forward in Clinic's previously innovative evolution.